On September 13, scientists at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Children’s Research Institute published the first high-powered microscopic images of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the airways of the lungs. A team of scientists, including Camille Ehre, captured the progressing COVID-19 infection in lab-grown cells of the respiratory tract, demonstrating the intensity of the infection in lung tissues and how quickly it could spread to others. . The images show a large number of coronavirus particles settled on human respiratory surfaces that were first recorded as monochrome, then recolored, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the scientists, the published images show the infectious form of SARS-CoV-2 released by infected host cells on respiratory surfaces. The scientists first injected the new coronavirus into the laboratory bronchial epithelial cells of human lungs and then examined the progress of the COVID-19 respiratory disease for nearly 96 hours with a high-powered scanning electron microscope. Subsequently, images of the coronavirus were captured on the human respiratory surface that also suggest the importance of the use of masks, given the large amount of viral load observed in the pulmonary airways.
“The large viral load is a source of spread of infection to multiple organs and determines the frequency of transmission of the coronavirus to others,” explained the scientists in the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Infected hairy hair cells
Scientists from the University of North Carolina (UNC) suggest in the study that the large coronavirus burden on respiratory surfaces could rapidly lead to infection of multiple organs in a coronavirus-positive individual. Therefore, to limit the amount of this virus load, which determines the intensity of the disease, the use of masks is mandatory. In the pictures, you can see that the hairy hair cells in the lungs are infected with strands of mucus attached to the tips of the cilia. These hair-like structures carry trapped mucus and virus from the surface of the epithelial cells of the airways in the lungs.
The density of the coronavirus in the epithelium of the human respiratory tract can be seen in the images, which also show the large number of virions produced and released per cell in the respiratory system.
“The virion is a complete virus particle that consists of an outer protein layer (capsid) and an inner nucleic acid core (either RNA or DNA),” the scientists explained in the study.
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(Image credit: New England Journal of Medicine).
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